How Comics Are Made

How Comics Are Made celebrates the evolution of the comic strip: from the Yellow Kid and early syndication through the very latest webcomics. This covers the whole ball of wax of how artists, knowing their newsprint medium, drew their comics and marked up drawings for color reproduction; how printers put that work through the most arcane and impossible-to-believe operations to get them onto paper; and how modern cartoonists produce cartoons for print and for online or web-only publication.

For a limited time, I’m offering signed and optionally inscribed copies, where you can have me write a message to you or someone else. You can also have your copy gift-wrapped at no extra cost! For regular copies, consult your local or online bookstore.

This visually rich book is laden with original cartoon artwork, photographs, scanned newspaper reproductions, and illustrations, some of which have never appeared in print anywhere, while some historic comics appear for the first time ever in any medium in this book. The book features a three-page foreword by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Chabon.

How Comics Are Made is a 288-page full-color hardcover book with a printed case cover and dust jacket. It measures 8½×11 inches (22×28 cm) and includes a 14-page index.

What you’ll find in the book:

• How artists incorporated feedback from newspaper printing into their aesthetic and drawing choices
• Bill Watterson’s choices when it came to coloring Sunday strips
• Laying down tones and patterns: artists’ stipples and dots, Ben Day screens, Zipatone, and digital coloring
• The transition from relief (raised metal or letterpress) printing to offset (flat or planographic)
• The shift from a limited set of colors for Sunday strips to “full” color
• How artists show Black faces in a medium favoring empty circles: cross-hatching, tints, tradition, and more, with a guest appearance from Langston Hughes
• The elaborate process of syndication before photostats, photocopiers, and scanners
• Drawing and production methods of artists making webcomics
• Rare original and printing artifacts showing cartoons that never appeared in print